Before I had a child, I travelled ten months of the year. I was an expert packer. I carried only hand luggage, unless I was on a long assignment - then I could fit two months' worth of gear, including a satellite phone, into one small duffle bag and a backpack. I knew every flight connection on the African continent. I was always up to date on inoculations in case I went to a cholera zone at short notice.
Because my life had no structure in those days, I bought my tickets at the airport on the day of departure. If I ever did that rare thing and took a holiday, my boyfriend and I would decide two hours before where to go, then arrive at a destination we had never been to with no transport or hotel booked. It was spontaneous and wild and fun.
My son, Luca, was born in February 2004, after I reported the war in Iraq. When I was pregnant, people with children - who seemed to me like another race - would look at me smugly and say: "Just wait." Being even more smug than them, I thought: "You just wait! When I have a kid, he will go everywhere with me!" I was so naïve. I went to work in Gaza five months pregnant and people asked what I would do when the baby came. "Put him in a basket," I said stupidly. "And take him with me." I even (this seems the most tragic of all) told Mona, my translator in Baghdad, in May 2003, before things got really terrible, that I would bring Luca back with me to Iraq the next time I came and let her mother take care of him while I worked.
As it turned out, when Luca was born I was seized with a mother-lion protective instinct, so of course he never went to Iraq or Gaza with me. But I began travelling with Luca when he was two weeks old. He came to Deauville with my mother and my husband and sat propped up in his car seat as we drank vodka martinis in the elegant Hôtel Normandie. "This is the youngest baby ever inside a bar," my mother remarked.
Later, in Biarritz, he slept swaddled in cashmere blankets inside my open suitcase because we did not have a carrycot. When he was two months old he came to St Barths, and joined us for dinner every night, sleeping neatly on a chair next to us. But those were the easy days, when he fitted inside one of the little baby boxes on the plane.
At nine months he started walking, and from that moment, my life changed. While other children were timid and clung to their mothers, Luca was intrepid. More than once, people took me aside and said my little boy had no fear. I shrugged helplessly. What did they expect with parents like us? His father, after all, had abseiled down the Eiffel Tower with a camera slung over his shoulder. We had met during the war in Sarajevo. We lived together in Africa during coups and wars.
But travelling got trickier and living in Paris means sometimes you just need proper sun. I love the Caribbean and have travelled all over it, with boyfriends, without boyfriends, with husband, without husband, with child, with girlfriends. I have been to house parties and birthday parties and rented villas and stayed in so many hotels, from the sublime to the ridiculous, that I could write a guidebook. Once I stayed on a private island where servants set up tables with linen and crystal and silver at tea time and stood to attention. That was a little embarrassing, and not really my style. But I know I will never again be served while wearing a bikini, in bare feet, so it's a good memory.
